does this only work if labor markets are efficient?
376 karma · joined March 31, 2020
Again, this won't apply to everyone.
e.g. did the evolution of homo sapiens and its subsequent monopolization of earth resources decrease the chances of another intelligent species evolving? Probably.
maybe eukaryoticity and sexual reproduction are also advantages so great they confer world domination to their lineages, and therefore will exhibit this kind of founder effect.
Once a world-dominating feature evolves, the rest of the tree must produce a competitor before resources are exhausted, otherwise the feature will only appear once in present lineages. It'd be interesting to know what effects modelling this might have on the resolved probabilities. Seems like the time-to-takeover/time-to-evolve ratio would be the critical factor.
The thought experiment would be: if you took away all the life with feature X, how long would it take to re-evolve that feature?
It might seem like Earth's resources are so vast that they couldn't possibly be 'taken over' in a meaningful way, but consider that all life is competing for a very narrow window of mineral availability, pH, and temperature, and that straying from these consensus boundaries requires you to evolve a huge amount of technology to begin using energy. Also recall that life tends to reproduce conditions suitable for its own continuance. So the result would be, that if you evolve something cool like a mitochondria, you might be able to replace your ancestors in every currently exploitable niche with significant energy flow in fairly short order.
If the tesla software were open, it'd be trivial to make this feature optional.
I know boycotts don't work.. so somebody (Cory Doctorow?) Wake me up when they start making an OSS car.
Most fascinatingly, because it's possible that an excessively cautious attitude towards dangerous information can cause harm, this paper is a potential example of dangerous information. I hope the authors considered that before publication!
The facts contradicting this position are self evident to everybody living in the United States, but feigning ignorance is a very popular political position at the highest and lowest levels. Just keep quiet, take your payout, and be glad you're not on the bottom rung. applies even to "poor whites" (and always has, even/especially antebellum).
So naturally whenever things shake out such that 'poor whites' experience even the tiniest disadvantage, the banners are marshalled and the trumpet is blown. Nothing new under the sun.
How about this: maybe we /should/ treat unvaxed minorities before unvaxed whites-- the latter group has infinitely more historical reason to trust these institutions. Or did I miss the bit where we shot Appalachians full of syphilis?
I know a company where engineers publicly set their own twice-yearly objectives, which are then linked to their bonuses. You can imagine a number of advantages to this system from the perspective of someone trying to optimize a firm: high performers will set difficult goals, sandbaggers will set easy goals that look difficult. Telling the difference is still hard because often only an already-expert person can estimate a problem's difficulty, but at least the loop gets closed in theory.
If the companies you work for never catch you sandbagging, then you're good .. until they go out of business because of all the other dead weight they're carrying and you find the remaining firms use technologies that require you to re-adapt your sandbagging strategy. The firms hope that this adaptation itself will refresh your motivation for a decent percentage of your vest period (since you're one step closer to being truly obsoleted and need to build resume points). Anyone who stays past their vest period can assumed to be a sandbagger, so 2-5 years looks good.
Yeah basically you're fine for now; just remember that this business will kick you out on your ear eventually if you don't keep up. This can happen real fast sometimes. If you don't use some of your fallow time to do continuous learning, you might slip out of your salary range or out of employability entirely-- that's the tail risk you're taking.
Maybe that's why you feel some anxiety: you have a fat-tailed existential risk that hasn't triggered yet. You should feel anxious, it totally can and will trigger eventually.
Computer keyboards have one major problem: they cause carpal tunnel because your fingers have to fly all around the keyboard, especially to hit the modifier keys. Changing the order of the keys is a bit like rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic. Any solution solution has to move the modifier keys onto the thumbs and palm, and move the keys closer to the fingers in 3 dimensions so that finger travel is reduced. This is a solved problem now. You have to pay 300 bucks to get the keyboard and it's limited release, but you know how economies of scale work; if enough nerds want it, poor nerds will be able to get it eventually. I use this perfect keyboard, and it gives me instant wrist relief even if my fingers are screaming already from laptop keyboard use.
This is my second of its type actually, the first was stolen :( and I had to deal with wrist pain until I could afford another one.
That said, there is probably no way to fix the laptop keyboard, due to it lying in a plane (so the laptop is flat) and being tiny (must be smaller than the screen). So that sucks.
it's a keyboardio if anyone is curious. They're doing another run soon if you want to back it. Just realized if you google the words I used in this post you get the kinesis keyboard, which is the same price and has several fewer features.